Serpent, French, 17th or 18th cent.
Anonymous maker. Brass, leather, and parchment over a wood core. Arthur Hewitt Collection.
Here is what Arthur Hewitt said about this instrument in a letter dated 1926:
“The serpent which hangs over the fireplace came from Catherine Wolf’s collection. It is made of a wood core surrounded with old parchment choir music. The balance of this collection is in the Metropolitan Museum. For some reason this instrument was taken out because it was broken in half. Perhaps the executors did not know it was a musical instrument. It was secured by a junk dealer in Fourth Avenue who did not know what it was, and I saw it in his shop, in two pieces. He paid one dollar for it and charged me five dollars for it. I had seen several of these instruments in the collection at Nuremberg. When I came to repair this instrument I found that the centre core was made of four blocks of sprucewood box used to make the circle. This was then wrapped in parchment of several layers and thickness. This particular instrument was evidently made by some particular choir master because the parchment wrapping the core are all sheets of colored parchment embossed with notes in choir master’s tablature. I only unwound a small strip to find what it was made of... I played this instrument and found that I could get about two and half or three octaves from it. The noise was very mellow in sound, much pleasanter than that of a brass instrument, similar to the bellowing of a cow in tone. I think that it is a pity that the quality of the tone of this type of instrument should have been lost from the orchestra.” |
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